Knowingness - by Robert Minto - Register of Aliens

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Knowingness<br>notes on an intellectual status game

Robert Minto<br>Jul 22, 2026

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Knowingness is the quality of appearing to know something. It’s also the basic move in a status game played by intellectuals. In this game, you want to appear to know the most. Please note: you want to appear to know the most.

I remember watching the initiation of a first year PhD student into the game of knowingness. He was standing nervously by the punch bowl at a reception, when one of my friends, a third year PhD student in philosophy, walked up and introduced herself.<br>“So what do you want to work on?” She asked.<br>He smiled and blurted out: “Aristotle!”<br>“Oh yeah? What about him?”<br>I saw the sudden shift in posture, felt my mirror neurons activating. She—and I, eavesdropping—leaned forward to await the poor guppy’s response. Cruel dark wings of knowingness unfolded satanically from our shoulders.<br>He sensed the vibe and gulped down a mouthful of punch. “Uh... I’m quite taken by his ethics?”<br>She smiled. “But don’t you find it impossible for his practical philosophy to speak to us until we sort out the problem of entelechy, and the larger difficulties of his metaphysical naturalism?”<br>Appalled, stricken, clutching his red plastic cup like it was a sign emblazoned with the words I DON’T BELONG HERE, the poor first year’s blood drained from his face. I knew how he felt; I’d been him.<br>But mostly I was admiring my friend’s move set. She hadn’t really studied Aristotle, as far as I knew, not past the basics we all had to drill for our comprehensive exams. As someone who had studied Aristotle a bit more than that, I knew her question didn’t make sense. It certainly didn’t constitute a good objection to somebody being interested in Aristotle’s ethics. That didn’t matter. She’d taken the measure of her victim. She’d correctly judged the right words to imply that she knew a whole lot more than he did.<br>Ultimately they became friends. What the newcomer had to learn was how to play the game, how to send the volley back. (”Have you read Hegel’s Science of Logic?” “Sure, but of course one can’t understand it without mastering Kant’s first critique.” “Oh, I agree, though Kant himself makes little sense until you’ve come to grips with the metaphysics of Christian Wolff.” “Perhaps, but don’t you find that Wolff is little more than a footnote to Leibniz?”) I’ve seen it over and over again: a quick exchange of knowingness that clears the air, establishes respect, and allows two people cloistered by their expertise to interact like normal human beings—like a summer thunderstorm that breaks the heat.<br>You might think my friend was being mean. She wasn’t. She was introducing a neophyte to the game. The game has problems: the game sucks, frankly. But he was gonna have to play it eventually, and he might as well learn how it feels in a low stakes environment with a stiff drink near to hand.<br>Many new graduate students complain of intense imposter syndrome. Sadly, they are mostly getting this feeling from a bunch of actual imposters, slightly older grad students who have mastered the techniques of knowingness.

I really hate this status game. But I was no better back then, and I still fall into it at the most unexpected moments.<br>For example, right here on Substack, not so long ago, I managed to dickishly agree with someone in their comments, falling into old habits of knowingness. I’ll share the transgression so that this essay doesn’t seem like a complaint merely about other people. My comment was on an essay by Naomi Kanakia about how Walter Ong is “this year’s guy”—meaning, the cultural theorist most ubiquitously discussed in the popular press. To her lovely post on this topic, I made a reply beginning with this preening preamble—:<br>It’s funny to me that Ong is this year’s guy, because he’s part of a line of academic research that has moved considerably beyond him. (But then, that was also true of Girard.) In my opinion, the bit of his work that remains interesting today is actually his excellent study of Peter Ramus. Still, I agree with you that he is this year’s guy: he keeps popping up in my reading too.

Here, I am transparently seeking to appear to know more than my audience. I do this by signaling how much I’ve read. Every single sentence implies a pile of books, and even my manner of agreeing with the thesis of the essay I’m responding to is remarkably condescending. It’s a gratuitous performance, having no bearing on the actual thought I had to share, which comes after it.<br>What function does knowingness serve? I don’t actually remember what was going through my head as I typed those words. But I do recognize the gesture. What I learned in grad school is that competitive knowingness serves for academics the function butt-sniffing serves for dogs. You establish rank, secure standing to share your own ideas, ward off potential aggression, and even signal a...